Uncharted Waters » Business strategyhttp://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/uncharted-waters
News and analysis on the latest approaches in IT, to keep you on the leading edge... and keep you from being cut by it.Fri, 31 Jul 2015 03:46:53 +0000en-UShourly1Two Types of Powerhttp://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/uncharted-waters/two-types-of-power/
http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/uncharted-waters/two-types-of-power/#commentsMon, 20 Apr 2015 14:02:18 +0000http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/uncharted-waters/?p=2475

Have you ever noticed that people can get really dumb during negotiations?

I’m talking too dumb to believe. Professionally dumb.

There was, for example, the time I became a project manager, promoted from pay grade 220 to 240, and my supervisor wasn’t sure it was actually a promotion. (It was, I looked it up.) Or the time we bid to take over from another company, and the hiring manager didn’t know how much he was paying the other company. (“It’s on retainer, it’s complicated, I don’t know.”) Or the time we bid to subcontract, and the vendor in the middle forgot every single detail, from rate to who-is-the-end-client.

Perhaps, in some of these cases, they really did forget; they really did not know. It seems an interesting coincidence, though, that every time the information might be to my advantage, the other person did not know. If it was to their advantage, if our rate was too high, they would suddenly remember.

Discussing this with my wife, she was not surprised at all. “Look, Matt”, she said “You get power by giving information away. That’s fine. You have to remember that some people gain it by controlling the flow of information.”

Information Control At Work

Some things do require discretion. Reorganizations, layoffs, promotions, these things need to be planned by a small group and contained.

The issue is not keeping things to yourself. It is instead trying to gain advantage through the control of information. Bring a few people into your inner circle, and not only will they appreciate it, but they will fight to stay in the circle. Gather your army of political players, and use your gossip to gain advantage over the other side. In The Gervais Principle, Venkat Rao calls this “powertalk”, and it consists of trading information.

Now think of two managers, peers at the same company. One knows every project coming down the pike, who the key players are, who their enemies are, what their goals are to reach their bonus, and what the personnel moves will be over the next six months or so. The other is busy trying to build software. Which of the two will be more effective in getting themselves promoted?

The main reason people control the flow of information is probably because it works.

The Choice

In his book To Sell Is Human, author Dan Pink compares two car dealerships, one that control access to information and use aggressive negotiation techniques with another that provides one single price, printouts of the Kelly Blue Book suggested prices, as well as computers with internet access for customers do do their own research. Even today, Secret Societies operate with special, hidden knowledge, while some charities, religions, and even movements push for power through transparency. I couldn’t help but notice in the 2004 presidential election, both the democratic and the republican candidates were members of Skull and Bones – a secret fraternity at Yale University that admits only fifteen new members per year.

If you’ve read much Uncharted Waters, or met me, you probably see my strategy – to give away as much value as I possibly can. On the web I explore good work and how to pursue it, but it can never speak to your exact situation. That’s where phone calls and conferences come in where, again, I try to provide so much value that people say “gee, if we got that out of a lunch, imagine what we would get out of bringing him on-site!”

Just two weeks ago, I was in Portland, Oregon, with my family of five, about to pick up a rental car from Hertz. It was 9:00PM Pacific, about midnight back home; the rental area was nice and empty …

It was still nice and empty forty-five minutes later when we received our vehicle.

Wait, what?

It turns out the computer system was down from 1:00AM that morning until 3:00PM that afternoon. During that time, people still returned (and checked out) automobiles, and the technical staff lost them.

That’s right, they lost cars — knowing the car is on the lot, in one of a few hundred places, but not exactly where.

Then things get weird.

It wasn’t just this trip.

The Back Story

After calls to corporate, the branch, waits in line to get and return two different vehicles on two different trips, I’ve observed something. It seems to me that Hertz is set up to be what I would call “resource efficient”, keeping the staff busy and working all the time. The classic way to do that is to not only give them enough work to do, but more than enough work to do. This creates an inbox, or “queue” of work to pull from when a task finishes or or gets blocked. The next task to start gets pulled from the bottom of the inbox. Your requests, which is new, go to the top.

In other words: The workers are always busy, but any new request takes a long time to service. If you are talking to the wrong person, things get worse: -Your request has to work through stack A, get transferred to stack B, then work through stack B. For example, I called corporate when the back-left tire started to leak air. After a long set of pressing buttons to route to the right person, I was told to call the local branch where I had rented the vehicle. After I looked up the number on the internet (it was not on my receipt, only the 800 number for corporate) I called the local branch, and got the voicemail of a manager. The manager called me back three hours later, after I had put air in the tires.

On the return trip, I waited in line for ten minutes to have a worker scan my car decal. I told her there was a slow continuous leak that we had inflated every day or so; she said “mmm-hmm” and, from what I can tell, did nothing, leaving the leak for the next driver.

Why did she do nothing? I’m not sure, but my guess is she was busy. With a line of cars for her to attend to, dealing with this special issue would take time she did not have. This kind of short-cut-measure is exactly what happens when organizations pursue efficiency and apply pressure for results.

There are other ways to manage, such as pursuing effectiveness over resource efficiency. That is, plan to work less than 100% of the time, which creates an inbox that is empty. With an empty inbox, requests are serviced immediately or at worst, after the current job or two finishes. This “ability to respond” is a feature, something that we consider for ambulances and firefighters and even receptionists. Why not in knowledge work?

It Gets “Better”

In addition to the long line, my car had something else: A big flat-screen TV called NeverLost.

NeverLost is sort of mix of a map, GPS, roadside assistant, and trip planner.

It is also impossible to turn off, which makes it a hazard when driving at night. Eventually, for safety, we found a low-tech solution, placing my fleece coat over NeverLost so that it would not shine on me.

Let’s sum up: (A) A staff that was scheduled so aggressively that they had no time for exceptions combined with (B) A ‘feature’ I did not ask for that actually generated a road hazard.